Hey, Neville here:I got invited to speak at this thing called HustleCon in San Francisco.

Overall it went off really well, met some cool people, and got a free trip to SanFran. What’s even more impressive is that the organizer was a 25 year old named Sam Parr who walked away from the conference with over $40,000 of profit in his pocket.

I was originally gonna just write about my own experience there……but I’d rather listen to how Sam pulled together a conference within 2 months that made as much profit for him as an average American in a year.

I decided to host Hustle Con last May but the real work started the first week of June. Before this, I had never actually been to a conference before, let alone organized one…but my blissful ignorance helped me sell 400 tickets in just 7 weeks and generate over $50,000 in revenue.

This blog post explains how I did it.

How I Hustle And Flow-ed

Since I’ve been asked the same questions over and over, I thought I’d write this blog post in question-and-answer format.

“How did I find the speakers?
Did I pay them?”

This is the #1 question people ask me, but the answer is quite simple: I just asked. And no, I did not have to pay a single speaker.

In the early planning stage, I thought founders of big successful companies would be way to busy to speak at Hustle Con. When you think about it, founders really don’t need me. I mean, they’re rich, are stupid busy, and get asked for favors dozens of times a week.

At first, when I pitched founders, I’d try to convince them to come by explaining how fun the event would be or how they could grow their business because there’d be 400 people in the audience.

That pitch left me with jack squat.

Then I tried something a little different.

Instead of telling them I’d how much business would be generated from speaking (very little, realistically) I’d ask them to “come spread your company’s gospel to a live audience of 400 people and an online audience of 2,500 (students in our Udemy course).”

This worked WAY better.

Think about it…it feels good to not only talk about yourself in front of a large audience, but also to appear as an authority figure on your topic.

Additionally, high growth startups can’t hire fast enough, which is why startups pay recruiters around $30,000 per hire. And one thing that I didn’t realize is that a founder’s main job is recruiting top talent.

See where I’m going with this?

Convincing a CEO to speak at my conference was MUCH easier when I told them about the audience. There would be 400 highly qualified startupers who are eager to work hard and thirsty for knowledge…aka a CEO’s dream.

Finally, there was one BIG, BIGGGGG thing that set me apart from everyone else asking: persistence. And not the annoying kind of persistence (although I was accused of that once) but the polite, I-respect-this-guy-for-working-so-hard kind of persistence.

You see, I use to send one, maybe two emails to a potential customer, conference speaker, or anyone else I wanted something from. But if you’re trying to get in touch with an influential person you’ll most likely need to send 5 or 10 emails before getting a response back. I emailed some of the higher profile speakers at Hustle Con 7 times before getting a yes or no.

Now, I know what you’re saying “isn’t that kinda annoying?” No. Not if you do it in a respectful way, such as a reminder email every three days for a couple weeks.

Oh, and I almost forgot to address if we had to pay speakers or not. We did not. I did pay for Neville’s flight from Austin to San Francisco, but besides him every other speaker paid their own way. I asked a few authors, like Ryan Holiday and James Altucher to speak, but they wanted between $5,000 and $10,000. I declined.

How did I sell 400 tickets in 7 weeks?

I could write an entire freakin’ book on this question, but I’ll sum it up in two words: COLLECT EMAILS!

Here’s how I did it:

1. Writing/finding blog posts: I wanted to publish around 12 blogs posts…one for each speaker. I wrote a few on my own, while the others were posts each speaker had already written that were applicable to Hustle Con. I found these posts on their blogs and asked for permission to repost.

2. WordPress plugins: Before publishing the posts, I installed the two plugins to collect emails: Interrupt and SumoMe.

3. Creating a drip campaign: After outlining each blog post, I wrote 12 emails that told a funny/interesting story about the speaker that then made the reader want to click and head to my site to read the entire post in hopes that they’d share it with their friends. I then set the emails up as an autoresponder using Mailchimp so new users would get an email every day for 12 days at 10 AM after signing up. This step is KEY and if you have no idea what you’re doing, then I suggest taking Neville’s Autoresponder Kourse.

4. Publish and distribute the blog posts: Ok, so my autoresponder is set up and posts scheduled to be published. When publishing time came, I posted the blog posts on Reddit, Hacker News, dozens of Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter, Growth Hacker, Inbound.org and asked the speakers to share the post written about them.

Bada-bing-bada-boom. That’s it.

Sounds simple, right? Well, kinda. This method took a TON of finesse and time but it really, really worked.

A few tidbits I should mention

1. We had linear ticket sales: I’ve never heard of another conference selling tickets as consistently as we did. 99% of conferences sell 80% of the tickets in the last two weeks. But Hustle Con had extremely consistent sales. In fact, we sold out four days before the conference, which is pretty good. Our first ticket sale was on June 9th and the last was July 28th.

2. High traffic and strong list: The Hustle Con site launched on June 6th and within just a few weeks we were averaging somewhere around 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Our email list jump from 200 (pre-launch) to about 2,500 in 7 weeks. Not bad for such a young site, eh?

3. Branding: People loved our drip campaign because our emails were funny and unique. I know I get like 3,324 emails a day and 99% of them are just flat out crap and go straight to the ole’ trash, so I worked really, REALLY hard to make our emails killer.

My goal for each email was to tell a story, not sell. Storytelling works wonders and this made the Hustle Con brand memorable. In fact, I regularly received replies from folks saying how they couldn’t make it to the event but that they loved the emails and wanted to come next year. Of our list of around 2,500 emails, we average close to a 50% open rate, which is really good.

4. Give away tickets to influencers: To gain some extra traffic, I gave away 50 free tickets to popular friends of mine. This wasn’t a special process…I just found people with tons of Facebook followers and sent them a message inviting them to come for free in return for sharing our page on as their status.Yeah…as in a bribe. I didn’t even bother with asking them to share on Twitter, or as I like to call it, Shitter, because Twitter users rarely ever buy (in my experience).

5. Partner with other lists: Besides the obvious places like StartupDigest, WebWallflower, and Fetch, I made a list of dozens of Meetup groups and bloggers who I knew had huge lists and offered them 35% discounts. Pretty simple.

What did my cost breakdown looked like?

Most folks ask “ was Hustle Con was a success?” but I know what they’re really thinking – “how much money did you make?”

Hustle Con took in $56,844 in revenue and $40,212 in profit. I didn’t raise as much sponsorship money as I could have because I didn’t want lame sponsors coming so this number could have been WAYYY higher.

I was shocked so many companies would be willing to pay money to sponsor a conference. We raised around $19,250 in sponsorship money but looking back I think we could have done around $50,000.

In my opinion there are two types of sponsors: those who want brand exposure and those who want leads.

Big companies like, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have a HUGE marketing budget to spend on conferences. These guys are not looking for a return but just want to be part of cool events to build brand awareness. When I contacted these companies I sold them on the event speakers because that’s what made them want to sponsor the event.

Then there are smaller companies like recruiting firms or startups who are looking for some type of return. At Hustle Con we had a few recruiters sponsor because a potential recruit is worth between $10,000 and $30,000 so the possibility of getting a few quality leads is totally worth a sponsoring.

I’m not sure how other conferences do it, but I looked at my event as having three customers: sponsors, speakers, and attendees.

Because of this, I only chose sponsors who I thought truly added value. This way, I could promote the sponsor a ton to the speakers and attendees without being annoying because it’d be valuable for everyone. After the event I followed up with each sponsor and am happy to say that we totally exceeding their expectations. Attention to detail and taking care of the sponsors is key.

The process of contacting potential sponsors went something like this:

1. Prospecting: I made a list of 120 companies I liked who sponsored 2 or more conferences in the past along with their head of marketing’s email

2. Email: I emailed each company to set up a call.

3. The call: I’ve never had a “normal” sales job so I’m not sure how a typical sales call looks like, but I created my own process that worked really well.

My goal with the call wasn’t actually to get sponsorship money but to get them EXCITED about Hustle Con. This way their company would send 3 to 5 employees regardless if they sponsored the event because they saw how fun and valuable the experience would be. I had around 20 calls with potential sponsors. 7 or so actually bought a sponsorship package and nearly all of them sent at least one employee.

Did I work on this full time?

Yes. I loved every second of it.

Did the process drive you crazy?

Hustle Con was hands down the most fun I’ve ever had on any project…and it just so happened to make money too. In fact, I really didn’t care about money at all on this project. Sure, I wanted it to be profitable but revenue was not my main focus. This type of attitude made HC so much fun to work on and I wasn’t stressed or going crazy.

How did you get 25 awesome volunteers for free?

Hustle Con had 400 people in attendance, 15 speakers, 2 cocktail breaks, 2 meal breaks, and 1 after party. There was NO WAY IN HELL I could do it alone, so I enlisted the help of 25 volunteers to set up the day before and work the entire event the day of.

Most of the volunteers were folks who emailed me directly through the contact form on HustleCon.com and asked if I needed any help. The other volunteers came to me after seeing my Facebook post asking for help. Organizing the volunteers was a HUGE task. My roommate Nathan, who has led teams as big as 200 volunteers, was in charge of all of the volunteers. Him and I worked together to create teams of 4 and assigned each team a leader and a job. Then, we did a rehearsal the day before, which made everything run smooth as a baby’s ass.

———————————————————–

Welp, now you know what I know. If you found this useful then tell me in the comments section below.

Post navigation

42 comments on “HustleCon 2014 – I went, I spoke, but Sam made $40K from it”

Damn Sam this write up was impressive. To go from not having attended a conference to putting one on and then making it successful!
Question for you Sam, what made you decide on doing a conference instead of something else?

Thanks Neville for sharing this with your readers. You’ve subtly gotten me to pick up a few products from you and the AppSumo crew over time so your kopywriting skills are on point. Pretty much everything you’ve shared I’ve found useful. Not kissing ass just giving you props.

I decided to host a conference because it sounded fun. That’s really the only reason. My buddies Eric and liz hosted hustlecon last year and were kind enough to allow me to do it this year. I really wanna get into hosting concerts and other live events so I thought this would be perfect.

Thanks for the post. We are about to have our first conference ever next week and there are many things in common with Sam’s experience. Our conference is much smaller than Sam’s (120 guests) but I am definitely using his post as a guide for next year’s planning.